What are nested journeys?
Overview
A nested journey is a journey that lives inside another journey. It lets you break a complex experience into smaller, more focused parts — so you can keep a high-level view without losing the detail underneath.
Use nested journeys when a single journey becomes too large to work with, or when different teams need to zoom into specific parts of an experience without affecting the bigger picture.
Why nested journeys matter
Real customer experiences are rarely simple. Mapping everything in one journey can make it long, hard to read, and difficult to maintain. Nested journeys solve this by letting you build a hierarchy:
- A parent journey gives the high-level overview — useful for leadership and cross-team alignment
- Nested journeys sit underneath it, providing detail for the teams doing the work
This way, everyone can see the view that's most useful to them, and it all connects back to the same framework.
How nested journeys work in TheyDo
When you add a journey inside another journey, the parent journey shows a summary lane — a single row that gives you a snapshot of what's nested inside, at a glance.
As you add Opportunities and Solutions to nested journeys, their status contributes to the overall progress of the parent journey. This progress shows up in the Progress Bar across your Goals, Opportunities, and Solutions sections, so you can track how child journeys are moving forward in context.
Typical zoom levels
A common pattern in TheyDo is to organize journeys by level of detail:
| Level | Type | Example |
|---|---|---|
| L0 | Lifecycle / Framework | End-to-end customer lifecycle |
| L1 | Macro journey | "Buying a phone" |
| L2+ | Micro / Task journeys | "Activating the SIM", "In-store purchase" |
Each level zooms in further, giving teams the right amount of detail for their focus area.
When to use nested journeys
Nested journeys work well when:
- An experience has too many steps or lanes to fit cleanly in one journey
- A journey has branches or non-linear paths that are easier to map separately
- Different audiences need different levels of detail — an exec overview versus a team-level breakdown
- You want to track progress at a granular level while keeping the big picture intact